Voted early today, around 2pm, in Florida. While the majority of those voting at the same time were retirees--but not all of them--it was a fairly busy place. Not as busy as it'll be come election day, of course, but moving right along.

Not many candidates claiming Tea Party affiliation on the ballot, though. Most important was to dump every official with a (DEM) behind his/her name, right down to the school and hospital boards.

Death to the AARP!

To the panels with them!

We have better looking women too...

Aging hippie women don't really hold up all that well. On average.

Errr...the internet revolution is squarely a Gen X thing.
and no...'80 music is the best...sorry ;-)

I'm a boomer. I've always been a conservative, so I wish the tea party movement well, but I have a feeling that a lot of those of us who have moved to the right this time are only interested in protecting their own little entitlements. This administration made the big mistake of jumping on a temporary domination of the federal government to pull away the curtain and show us what progressives have in mind for all of us. We may reverse this process, but one election won't do it.

I think the issues of the relationships between taxes, spending and deficits are starting to sink in, but I'm concerned that the retiree segment who have bolstered the tea parties may get weak in the knees when it comes to holding the line on entitlements.

Jorg: there was music in the '80s?

Err, I mean Mr. Lawson.

Dear Mr. Lawson,

This aging hippie started working on microcomputers in 1975. You know - a real hacker. The Internet was an outgrowth of that work.

The microprocessor revolution - I did my bit

I think the issues of the relationships between taxes, spending and deficits are starting to sink in, but I'm concerned that the retiree segment who have bolstered the tea parties may get weak in the knees when it comes to holding the line on entitlements.

In a perverse way those entitlements are a motivation. If the government collapses where will the money come from? I think a phase out is in order.

Oh, you guys have your moments and your shining stars -- however we WILL NEVER forgive those guys with long grey hair and respirators in all the ANSWER rallies. Or the ones who told us our generation stood for nothing, because we weren't standing for socialism. Sorry. No. They're the "hippies" in "punch a hippie" and also in "hippies are dirty and they steal" (a quote from Bride and Prejudice, one of the great works of art of modern civilization .

As for the music, eh. I grew up with it because my brother is nine years older than I. (No. Boomer doesn't go to 64, sorry. We don't have the generational markers. My brother is one of the "younger" boomers.) I still like a lot of it. You can have my Leonard Cohen when you pry the CDs from my cold, dead fingers. But as I age I find myself drifting more and more to classical.

HOWEVER -- and this is a BIG concession -- I'm willing to concede that the typical lefty-useless-boomer image is a creation of the largely far left media.

"Entitlements?" Hell! This baby boomer just wants back what she paid in under duress to the Medicare and Social Security scams!

I survived Roe v. Wade and no-fault divorce. Thank you Boomers! Yes, nice music.

Be careful. The Real Clear Politics numbers have been swinging to the Democrats for seveal days now. Poll numbers, house seats, statehouses and the senate.

Relax and they will be like the ants in the last Indi jones movie!

Boomers are this generation's Silent Majority. Except they aren't silent. That's why the Dems are messing their pants.

The Real Clear Politics numbers have been swinging to the Democrats for seveal days now.

I have been watching the trends for the House.

Last week it was Ds 185 Toss Up 39 Rs 211. Steady most of the week.

Latest Ds 179 Toss Up 43 Rs 213

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2010/house/2010_elections_house_map.html

No quarter on the music. Mr Lawson had it right: '80s music is the best. Also, crediting the pioneers of the microprocessor revolution with the Internet revolution is like crediting the Enlightenment for the space age. Technically true, but not very direct. The foundation may stretch back into the '70s but the Internet didn't become a phenomenon until the '90s. Sorry, he's got you there too: Gen X wins that round.

Anyway let's not forget that even if more of them finally have woken up to some economic reality, the Me Generation at large still bears a lot of the responsibility for getting us into this mess. And with all those underfunded pensions coming due, we aren't out of the woods by a long shot. Welcome to the party, pals.

Lummox,

Evidently you never heard of BBSs and their spawn FIDO net. Follow my link in the comments above to learn more. Us geeks had an Internet before there was an Internet. The lineage is pretty direct.

I was kinda a late comer to the Internet. There were already 20 million users when I first logged on in Dec of '95.

The internet is an outgrowth of darpa and back before the genx'rs suddenly discovered the www this boomer was helping build that backbone one DEC network card at a time. We invented routers without which you'd still be trying to figure out the path from email server to email server.

Flyfish points in a more profitable direction. The Internet was the end (beginning?) of a number of trends that came together. DARPA was definitely an important thread. Critical. But having all those home computers was equally important.

You are more right than you know when you link the Tea Parties to the Internet... in fact the best way to describe the Tea Party Movement must utilize not only the ideas of the Internet but how we adopted and adapted to it and it to us. This is not a 'populist' form of movement, but something that can only be described in the terminology brought up around the Internet... any other way used to describe it will miss the salient points of the movement and be hit broadside when it does things that cannot be predicted in the older framework of things.

I don't know why anyone is surprised that Boomers are heavily represented in the TEA Party movement. There were a helluva lot more baby boomers in Viet nam than ever went to Woodstock or wore flowers in their hair in San Francisco. So, the kids that could afford to sit it out got the publicity, they still were nowhere near the numbers of us that went to work.

Sorry, I'm a boomer, those wusses did not ever represent me or mine.

"The people who brought you the Internet Revolution"????

I'm pretty sure it was GenX....

I am 60, started working on computers in 1974, started designing microprocessors a few years later and the work done by me, my coworkers and the companies that employed us made all this mess possible.

Al Gore was no where to be seen.

Pay attention to the *detail* and look at the arrows in the box on the upper right hand side....To quote Glen Rynolds (who stole it from Han Solo; "Great Kid, Don't Get Cocky!" >>

A Boomer trying to grab some glory, surprise, surprise, surprise...Too bad you all were so busy starting the Internet Revolution that you let this spending and great society mess get so out of hand. Should have kept your eyes on the road, boys.

Why do you think Obumma and the FCC want control of the internet? If you control it, you control the message. Beware my fellow ex-hipsters, they will be coming for us now
that we are organized. If your still left wing after fifty, you haven't grown a bit intellectually, and have regressed socially.

This Gen-Xer has nothing against the hard-working Boomer engineers who made his teenage life in BBS-land possible (where, btw, we discovered that, like the internet, you got respect for the quality of your argument, not how old you were!). Got in trouble for running up $24 in phone charges one month, too. Go internet.

The GenXer disdain for Boomers has always revolved around the assertion that the crowd which always thought itself the center of the universe, refusing to trust anyone over thirty, refuses to trust anyone under 50 now that THEY'RE "the man" holding everybody else down.

That sort of solipsism is not a fault to which engineers are inclined. Peace: we CAN have 80s music AND Lynyrd Skynyrd! YES WE CAN!

BoxingAlcibiades,

Thanks for that. My typical long distance bill in that era was $100 a month. My mate was really happy when I got it down to $30.

I was a Blue Wave kind of guy back then.

[WSJ] By NAFTALI BENDAVID
Key Senate races are tightening as candidates on both sides make unexpected gains, suggesting that the final days in the battle for control of the chamber could be as volatile as any in recent memory.

I just signed up to your blogs rss feed. Will you post more on this subject?

badmash,

Which subject exactly?